Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,1

house so as not to pass her front door, down to the end of Trinity Road and then straight across there at the lights on to the common. I was keen to avoid the busy row of shops and cafes on Bellevue. The reporters have cleared off but she’s right; you wouldn’t want to make too much of a performance of it. She walked very slowly, and I hooked my arm through hers and pulled her along. I tried to curb my irritation. Baby steps, I’d said, but I hadn’t meant it literally.

It was a crisp, blustery autumn morning, the sky frantic with clouds, the sun rushing in and out. I unclipped Maudie from her lead and she ran ahead across the grass: a patchwork of roving shadows. Ailsa’s pace picked up on the main path and when I drew attention to the loveliness of the big tall chestnuts – they’re beginning to catch fire – she made a murmuring sound, which I took to be agreement.

We should perhaps have turned round then, to quit while we were ahead. I blame myself that we didn’t. I like to think I am in touch with her moods, but I was insufficiently alert.

I was trying to be jolly, chatting inanely about the cygnets on the pond, how big they’d grown, when I became aware of two women, both blonde, with small dogs on leads, walking towards us. It was like a magnetic field, the tension, the anticipation, in their silence. Ailsa did too, or maybe she knew them. She knows a lot of people. Her breath changed: a sharp inhalation followed immediately by a strangulated whimper. She leant sharply into me – I wondered if she might fall – so I hoisted her off the path, and across the grass to the bench under the tree, the one that faces the incline down to the water. She hurled herself onto it, taking up most of the room, her head thrown backwards so she was staring up at the sky, her neck resting on the metal. After a few moments, she said, with some petulance, that she was exhausted; she hadn’t slept for days. And then she began to talk about Melissa: she’d emailed her again but she hadn’t replied; she wasn’t sure her messages were being passed on. It wasn’t fair. She told a long anecdote about a birthday picnic for the twins and how jolly it had been and something about a beautiful tree house they had built in Kent.

I stopped listening, I’m afraid. I don’t like hearing about Kent and I’ve heard a lot about the children recently. Also, I was pretty tired myself. I’m having to work at night, for obvious reasons. A couple of parakeets flew, squawking, between two trees. Maud was over towards the copse, taking those oddly prissy choreographed steps that mean she’s stalking a squirrel. The light was buttery, with a cool sharpness to the air, the criss-cross patches of sky a lovely washed blue. Under our feet was a proper scrunch of autumn debris. I rolled the soles of my shoes over it, finding the noise satisfying. I thought about Ailsa’s voice, how posh it is and how her sentences can turn up at the end; sometimes even in the middle. I wondered for the first time how it would play with jurors. Conclusion: not well.

When she first leant forwards, I assumed she was looking at my legs. I was wearing those zip-off trousers that are so comfortable for walking, and a section of my lower calves were on display. Her eyes were focused on the tiny scales – the completely perfect white circles that are evidence of age; idiopathic guttate hypomelanosis, to give them their correct name. I thought she might be about to comment – ‘You must see my dermatologist’ – so her words came as a shock.

‘At first, I didn’t . . . you know, it was as if he just had something stuck in his throat, or it was too hot, like he’d eaten a whole chilli or something. You know? But the water I gave him it was all coming out of the sides of his mouth . . . I mean, his tongue was—’ She began scraping her top teeth along the surface of her own tongue, back and forth. I couldn’t think what she was doing, until I realised with a sickening lurch that she was giving a demonstration.

‘How awful,’ I said. I had a panicked feeling